


speak for the devil that haunts me

by thingswithteeth



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, M/M, in-universe alternate universe, is alternate universe - canon compliant a thing?, typical spiral nonsense
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-14
Updated: 2019-12-14
Packaged: 2021-02-26 04:07:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,229
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21797377
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thingswithteeth/pseuds/thingswithteeth
Summary: The third time Gerry meets Michael Shelley doesn’t count, because what he’s meeting is no longer Michael Shelley.
Relationships: Gerard Keay/Michael, Gerard Keay/Michael Shelley
Comments: 23
Kudos: 246
Collections: Rusty Quill Secret Santa 2019





	speak for the devil that haunts me

**Author's Note:**

  * For [AWitchOfMind (MroBeta)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MroBeta/gifts).



> Title is Fairport Convention.

Gerry meets Michael Shelley twice.

The first time it’s because he’s become tired of waiting for Gertrude on the steps of her Institute in the middle of a driving rain, cold drips slowly worming their way between his hair and the collar of his jacket. He’s known her maybe two months by then. He’s grateful but not yet devoted to her, and being left to marinate outside while she completes her work makes him feel spiteful rather than resigned, as he will do eventually, once he’s grown accustomed to Gertrude’s quirks and found a reason to tolerate them.

It’s boredom as much as the weather that drives him indoors. The receptionist looks a little skeptical when he tells her he’s there to make a statement, but he’s seen enough actual horrors to sketch a story more convincing than the average grandpa in off the street convinced that the twenty-somethings in the flat downstairs are trying to summon Satan. Once he’s past the dragon at the doors it’s easy enough to go down the stairs and get lost in the stacks rather than turning into the office to which he has been directed. 

He doesn’t really intend to start pawing through the statements, but he also doesn’t surprise himself with his lack of restraint. He’s always been curious. He’s always wanted to _know_. He’s never not been aware of what his curiosity is feeding.

The half hour that he spends flipping through Gertrude’s library of terror—well, it’s more interesting than standing in the rain, even if most of the statements he plucks from the boxes on the shelves are pretty obviously credulous fantasies at best and deliberate invention at worst. There’s no real filing system that he can spot, but that doesn’t bother him. He’s not trying to write a thesis, he’s trying to keep himself entertained, and for that he prefers poorly organized fiction. If he were to stumble across one that read as true, he’d have to stop and think about it as a bad thing that happened to a real person, and that would significantly diminish its value as entertainment.

(He’s never really been able to help himself. He thinks of the girl in the café in Genoa, the one so plainly marked that breathing too deep around her had made his chest ache like it had been hollowed out. He doesn’t think of her often – tries not to think of any of them – but he does hope she made it out all right. He knows that she probably didn’t. That’s why it’s best not to feed strays. He’s not quite the optimist he would need to be to assume that if they don’t come to his door a second time, it’s because they’ve found somewhere warm and safe to sleep.)

He’s busy feeling a little sorry for whichever archival assistant had been forced to sit with dryly academic professionalism through a statement about someone’s decidedly _amorous_ encounter with a ghost when he hears footsteps behind him. He doesn’t bother to move or put away his reading material or try to find some way to disguise the small puddle that has gathered around his boots. Those footsteps are close enough that there’s no way he’s been overlooked in the long, empty row of archival shelving, and extensive experience has taught him that the only real solutions to being caught are to run or to brazen it out. If it’s Gertrude, he’s toast anyway, and running will only rob him of his dignity and increase her ire. If it’s one of her assistants, what exactly are they going to do? To _him_? Call security? Tell Gertrude? _Catalogue_ him?

When Gerry deigns to look up from the statement, the man standing in front of him appears to be doing exactly that, mouth turned down and brows pulled into a fussy line that reads more of puzzlement than displeasure. He’s tall, taller even than Gerry and long through the limbs like all of his childhood growth spurts had hit at once and the rest of him had never quite bothered to catch up. His belly strains gently against the moth-eaten wool of his jumper, the only part of him other than his round face that isn’t bones and angles, a once thin man gone comfortably soft with middle age and what Gerry imagines is a mostly sedentary job for anyone who isn’t Gertrude. His hair is improbably yellow and the length looks more like neglect than vanity; although he would deny it, Gerry knows a thing or two about what it looks like when someone is vain about his hair. He looks—he looks kind, and that’s enough to make Gerry feel scratchy and irritable under his skin in a way he tries not to examine too closely.

(The soft strays, the trusting ones, the ones who never see an outstretched hand and think it might be a lure, who never glimpse a light in the distance and decide “approaching train” rather than safely, they never last long, not in this line of work.)

“You’re not supposed to be here,” says the stray, the lilt at the end turning it into a question even though they’re undoubtedly both well aware of the answer.

“Probably not,” Gerry says, and waits resignedly for the scandalized commotion he can practically feel coming.

The stray doesn’t seem inclined to commotion, however. He keeps frowning, keeps looking, like Gerry is a knot he’s trying to untangle, and if that’s not the Archives lot in a nutshell he doesn’t know what is. He’s a little curious himself, the question of what happens next more of a riddle than he had expected.

“Trying to get out of the cold?” It’s another largely unnecessary question, too kind and too pitying for him not to have already made up his mind about the answer, like _he’s_ the one cosseting some half-feral creature undoubtedly destined for a grim end. The tone makes Gerry want to bristle but it’s true enough, so in the end he offers nothing but a shrug.

“Can you—can you put that back?” the stray asks. He’s visibly trying not to cringe at the damp fingerprints Gerry is leaving on the statement but he still hesitates over the request, as though it’s a favor he’s asking, really, rather than the reasonable expectation that the Archives might go unmolested by soggy strangers.

Gerry considers being contrary for the sake of it, but he doesn’t get the chance. “You can stick around until you’re ready to brave the weather again. Just keep quiet, yeah?” The accompanying smile is sunny as the sky outside is not and a little goofy and younger than the face it belongs to. “My boss, is, uh, she’s kind of a battleaxe.” He says it conspiratorially, a secret that they’re sharing, but there’s something bright and glowing in his voice and in his eyes. Love, Gerry thinks. Trust. He can’t imagine making a face like that when speaking about Gertrude Robinson. It’s charming, but charming in a way that looks a lot like _doomed_.

“Sure,” he says, agreement coming easier to his lips than it generally does, and he tells himself it’s because he’s pleased enough by the idea that Gertrude will never, ever know about this and not because he’s always been far _too_ pleased by being let in on a secret, even one so silly as this. It earns him another smile, and that’s the end of it.

The second time Gerry meets Michael Shelly, they don’t meet at all. He’s standing on the steps of the Institute again, waiting for Gertrude again, but this time she’s almost punctual and this time he’s known her long enough to have learned that she’s someone he’s willing to wait for.

She’s barely walked through the door and shivered a little in her thin jumper when someone’s stepping out behind her: Gerry’s tall stray. He drapes a thick wool coat across her shoulders and frets a little over the lapels, twitching them into place. “You forgot,” he says, warm and indulgent.

The expression on Gertrude's face when she peers over her shoulder at the man is one Gerry has never seen, as unsmiling as she ever is but so much gentler. Her voice is soft and quavering, perhaps a battleaxe but one made of glass. “Thank you, my dear.”

The response that gets is—he looks so _proud_ , and for a brief moment Gerry feels a little queasy with it. He’s never looked like that at Gertrude, but he does have to wonder if he’s ever looked like that.

“Doomed,” Gerry says, once Gertrude’s assistant has gone, and he doesn’t realize he’s said it out loud until Gertrude slices a glance in his direction, sharp and unamused, the fragile old lady routine shrugged off as easily as the coat had been shrugged on.

“Shall we?” she asks, and she doesn’t wait for a response, her heels clicking down the stairs and Gerry trailing in her wake.

He doesn’t think of it after that. (He tries not to. It’s best not to worry what becomes of the strays.) He never gets a name. Eventually, he mostly forgets. The world is ending. The world is _always_ ending, as it turns out, and that means there’s plenty else to think about.

The third time Gerry meets Michael Shelley doesn’t count, because what he’s meeting is no longer Michael Shelley.

The first time Gerry walks through a door that isn’t there, it’s—it’s a dumb mistake. He can admit that. He’s been around the block a few times, and he knows to be careful and not to let his guard down, even in the comfort of his very own Parisian hotel room, even at the end of a long day and a lost argument with Gertrude about the prospective virtues of burning a very literal love _nest_ to the ground. He just wants to wash away the reflexive, paranoid sensation of too many legs on his skin and go to sleep. He pushes open the bathroom door with half-closed eyes and steps through. Only after the door swings shut at his heels does it occur to him that when he had dropped off his bag and changed his shoes earlier, the door to the en suite had been blandly off-white instead of improbably yellow.

The hallway stretches out in front of him, listing gently off to the left like a drunk. The runner is black and thick beneath his feet. The walls are green. Gerry takes it in, and lets out a long breath. He is no longer tired, and he is suddenly, vividly certain that this is how he dies.

He doesn’t feel much about it, other than a brief stutter of nerves in his stomach and at the base of his spine. This isn’t the first time he’s recognized the certainty of his own death. It’s awful, but it’s also rote, an old habitual kind of fear.

There’s no longer a door behind him, just a mirror. The reflection doesn’t look quite like the one he glimpsed in the window of the taxi outside Gare du Nord this morning. It’s him, but his face is thin, almost gaunt, and there’s a certain waxy quality to his skin—not in the way of the Lightless Flame fanatics or the mannequin freaks, but bloodless and clammy-damp like the end of a long fever. He presses his palm against his cheek and finds it warm and dry, if a little greasy beneath the eye and beside the nose after a day spent gallivanting around Paris.

He starts walking. There’s not much else he can do.

There are more mirrors. There are more versions of him reflected in them. In one, his tattoos blink and roll, more than ink pressed stinging beneath his skin, sclera blazing white against his knuckles and the jutting bones of his wrists. In another, almost every visible inch of him blisters and bubbles, and the undamaged tattoos are the only reason he recognizes himself in the reflection. There’s one where the eyes he’s had drawn laboriously on his body over the years are nearly blotted out by hastily scrawled Sanskrit, a pale echo of Mary in her final hours and in all the hours that came after that. He looks away from that one quickly.

Eventually he begins to see something—else, reflected back at him, something distorted and twisting.

Extensive experience has taught him that there are really only two possible solutions to being caught: run, or brazen it out. He picks up his pace.

It doesn’t help. The thing that corners him is almost familiar, almost. He thinks he’s seen the straw yellow of its hair before, but nothing else about it is anything other than strange. The walls are a blinding neon pink. The runner that had been black (he thinks?) is now the most delicate celadon green, garish against the faded gold of the carpet.

 _This is how I die_. It’s not that he doesn’t believe it. He’s not so naïve. It’s that belief has proven false so often that he can’t quite feel it. 

“You’re interesting,” says the thing. “I think it’s because usually the same thing ruins us.” Its voice is more human than its form, but still strange, still _wrong_.

He realizes suddenly that he can’t pin down how long he’s been here. His internal clock says that it hasn't been more than a few hours, most of that spent peering into nightmare mirrors and contemplating the carpet, but his legs hurt as though he's been running for days and not minutes, a dull trembling ache in his thighs that makes him worry that even if he gets out of the corner he won't be able to force them to carry him for much longer. He should be alarmed, but he's relieved. He's started to doubt himself, and so he knows what he’s dealing with.

“Liar,” Gerry says placidly.

“I haven’t yet.” it says, and it holds out a hand. The fingers are too long and too sharp, tapering to points so precise that its short, bitten-off fingernails are basically triangles. “Here. Take it.”

There’s a folded up piece of paper in the thing’s hand. Gerry feels his own finger twitch. He’s always been a little too curious for his own good. “That seems like a bad idea.”

It smiles at him. It _smiles_. Gerry’s stomach clenches, eyes trying and failing to follow the way its mouth twitches and turns like a mouth shouldn't, the flesh of its cheeks as malleable as clay.

It smiles like nothing should be able to smile, yet Gerry can't quite shake the feeling that there's something familiar here, something he's seen before.

He reaches out and takes the paper. The creases are soft against his fingers, all the crisp edges worn away and dried dull with sweat until the page is no longer quite white. When Gerry looks at what he’s been given, it’s only in the briefest of glances, eyes always returning to the monster in front of him, even though he’s not entirely sure what he intends to do if looming and unnerving becomes the immediate threat of death and dismemberment.

“The map showed him the way in,” it says, and its smile is still uncanny but in a way that he can almost understand. “It will show you the way out.”

“Sure,” Gerry says, and it seems to find something about that funny. Its laugh loops around him, spiraling until it slides through meat and finds the bone beneath before sighing out at the end. Gerry looks down at the map. It looks like a map shouldn't. His eyes hurt if he stares at it too long, and yet he thinks he can follow it all the way back to his own cozy hotel room, if only he can get his brain to stop demanding that the lines make some kind of sense. That’s not what makes the blood under the thin skin of his wrists go throbbing cold.

There’s writing on the map. He recognizes the hand.

“The same thing ruins us, huh?”

It laughs again, but there’s no humor in its voice when it speaks. “Usually. Find your way out.” When he looks at it, it shrugs. The way it moves makes his head hurt splitting sharp for a moment behind his left eye. “Find your way out. Don’t take too long.”

Gerry’s never much believed that there’s a way out for him. On his best days, he believes that maybe there’s a way through.

“You were fortunate,” Gertrude tells him. She looks more pensive that she usually does but not truly concerned. “I have safeguards in place against that particular horror. I hadn’t thought I would need to extend them to you, but it seems that—that you’ve drawn more attention from my enemies than I had previously anticipated.”

He’s fairly certain that isn’t what she’d meant to say. He doesn’t question her, mostly because there’s not much more dissatisfying than asking for an answer and getting nothing. Gertrude has always had her secrets.

Maybe a year after they meet, long before he ever walks through the wrong door in Paris, Gerry drops by Gertrude’s flat and finds that she’s gone and got herself a cat. Were Gertrude anyone else, the presence of a fuzzy companion might not be so weird. He hears there are certain expectations normal people have of a woman Gertrude's age with no children or grandchildren or spouse to make the target of her affection. Gerry knows better. No use for a target when there’s nothing to aim. He sees the weedy old creature shedding on her sofa and mostly feels sorry for the cat.

“What’d you get that thing for?” he asks.

She snorts. “Penance,” she says. “For my sins.”

She doesn’t explain, and he doesn’t ask her to elaborate. She doesn’t appear to be joking, but that isn’t surprising. He keeps hoping she’ll show some sign of a sense of humor, and she has so far disappointed. “You looking for someone to take it?”

She arches a brow at him. “I never took you for a cat person, Gerard.” She looks at the cat. Its long fur is patchy and beneath he imagines he can see a hint of ribs. “Surely the poor beast deserves better.”

He doesn’t take it personally. Neither of them lead the kind of life that lends itself to having dependents, even the four-legged kind. He still takes the cat home that night. The tag around her necks says _Alice_. There’s a phone number on the opposite side. He calls it before falling asleep that night. He’s always been too curious for his own good. _“Hello. You’ve reached Michael Sh_ —. _”_ There’s a problem with the connection and it dissolves into static after the first few words. He doesn’t bother to call back. The name means nothing to him.

The cat curls up against him that night. She’s as thin as he had first suspected, her paws strangely brittle feeling as she kneads painful pinpricks into his shoulder. Her fur is matted and a little greasy beneath his fingers, but she purrs loud enough for him to feel it through the mattress when he scratches beneath her chin. In the morning, her takes her to his downstairs neighbors. He’s relieved to find Cynthia home; Jess is all right but she prides herself in being a bit of a shit, and she’d have an easier time saying no.

He doesn’t know either of them, not really. There was a time when that would’ve made him a little sad. He’d spent so many years hovering between a disdain for the ordinary that feels too much like Mary's for him to want to claim it and his own adolescent desire not to be too strange to be loved. Now he leaves Cynthia cooing over a geriatric cat and tells himself it’s a relief to be on nodding terms with the girls downstairs and nothing else.

It’s good that way. It’s better.

After his first time, he’s more careful of doors. He checks them before he steps through, at least while he’s waking. He’s less cautious asleep. Gertrude’s safeguards are worth less than she thinks they are. Occasionally he thinks about telling her and seeing if there’s something more she can do. He doesn’t.

The corridor twists out before him. There are moments when he thinks he can almost understand its path, as he had almost understood the map. The mirrors reflect, sometimes his own image, sometimes that of the creature who had stalked him through the maze and yet inexplicably let him go. Sometimes it’s the face of a man who almost looks familiar, or a woman in a pinstripe suit and sensible shoes, mascara streaking her cheeks. Sometimes it’s half a dozen other people unrecognized and spotted only at a distance, as thought each mirror is just another corridor stretching on into forever.

“So what’s the plan?” he asks one of the mirrors. “You trying to wriggle your way into my head? Seems on-brand, I suppose. Or maybe I’m sleepwalking my way back here right this very moment. I’ll wake up and be standing right in the same spot. Spooky.” His shudder is faked, dramatized, even if the hard knot of anxiety in his stomach is real. He’d tried running the last time and not accomplished much; he’ll try being brazen and see if that nets him better results.

(Unhelpfully, he’s too smart not to know that escaping once was perhaps the best possible result.)

Reflected in this mirror is a man, his eyes red-rimmed with exhaustion or tears and his blond hair matted into the kind of snarl that would make Gerry at least briefly consider just chopping it all off were he to find it on the back of his own head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he says. His voice is hoarse, like he’s been screaming for hours, and muffled like it’s coming from—well, from behind a pane of glass. “I’m just trying to find the center.”

That wrecked voice is less familiar than the face, so Gerry isn’t sure why hearing the man speak is what finally allows him to fit memory to context. The stray from the Archives, the tall hapless soul who had looked at Gertrude like she had hooks in his heart. _Doomed_ , Gerry had thought. He doesn’t enjoy being this right.

“Best of luck,” he says, aware that it's hopeless but unable to do or say anything else. The man nods distractedly and looks down at the creased piece of paper in his hand. Even through the warped glass of the mirror, Gerry recognizes it. The map is in better condition than it was when he received it, but not by much. After a moment, those bloodshot eyes lift again, but they no longer seem to be focused on Gerry. There’s a new determination to that gaze, and it takes effort not to flinch when a fist plows directly into the other side glass. The man is wearing gloves, at least, but Gerry would bet it still hurts. That doesn't keep him from doing it again, and the glass cracks beneath his fist. Again. Gerry gets one last glimpse of the not-entirely-a-stranger, his face twisted into a grimace behind a spider web of broken glass, before the mirror goes dark.

Curious, he reaches out and touches the glass. It’s intact on this side but strangely, almost disconcertingly warm, like something alive.

The thing that had found Gerry in the corridors during his last sojourn is standing behind the next mirror. It stretches and distorts, but this time, with the original model so fresh in his memory, it’s easier for Gerry to spot the similarities: the hair, the shape of its face, when it has a face. “You were her assistant.”

“No,” it says, which isn’t unexpected; lying is what the Spiral does. Then is says, “Michael was her assistant.”

“And you’re Michael.”

“No.” It smiles at him. “Except when I am. Sometimes I’m not. Sometimes I’m Helen. Sometimes I’m even only me, just on the edge of becoming.” The smile has too many teeth, and it just keeps getting wider, impossibly so. “Everything here is on the edge of becoming something. Or not becoming something. Or never being anything at all. Are you beginning to understand?”

“No,” Gerry says.

It laughs its burrowing, twisting laugh. “I thought I was supposed to be the liar.” It reaches out a hand and he jerks back reflexively, certain the mirror won’t stop it.

He wakes up.

It’s not the last time he dreams of the place behind the yellow door.

The creature is wearing a pinstripe suit and a woman’s face this time. Gerry is almost relieved not to recognize her. She looks like she recognizes him, however, eyes tracking him from behind glass. “The other me,” she says, “Michael. He liked you.”

“Didn’t know me,” Gerry says, and moves to walk past her.

“Not that one,” she says, and laughs. The laugh is the same. “Sometimes he knows you better. Sometimes he knows you _much_ better. Sometimes he thinks you remind him of someone he once knew, a friend he lost. He’s right. Mostly he likes you. Yours—well, he liked the look of you, at least. I suppose he never got the chance to like anything else about you. Do you understand?”

He thinks he might be starting to, but doesn’t really want to give her the satisfaction.

There are days when he can almost convince himself that the dreams are just dreams. There are days he thinks that he never actually left the corridors the first time, that the moments in between when he wakes up and brushes his teeth and gets on a plane with Gertrude are the delusion. The Distortion must be well pleased by the job it's done.

It’s difficult not to come to certain conclusions.

“What did you do?” he asks Gertrude one night in another nondescript hotel room, this one in Beijing, almost too tired to chew his takeaway dinner and far too tired to be cautious. He’s been tired a lot recently. His age catching up with him, probably, although that just seems wildly unfair, since Gertrude is forty-five years older than him at _least_ and doesn’t seem to feel a day of it.

She looks at him over her bifocals. He thinks she might be a little tired too, because she doesn't even try to dissemble, she just shakes her head and says, “My dear, what haven’t I done?”

The door isn’t yellow. That doesn’t matter. He can feel it waiting for him to open it.

The thing standing on the other side of the door looks like Michael, but Gerry knows it’s not, not the original Michael, at least, the one who had been Gertrude’s assistant. He’s decided that Gertrude probably fed that Michael to this monster and this place. He's seen her handwriting on the impossible map long since left behind, shredded and shoved beneath the passenger seat of a rental car. He's spent years watching her throw herself against the world until the world yields. She's a woman accustomed to making sacrifices, and he understands her too well these days to think she would recoil at the thought of some of those sacrifices being something other than bloodless and metaphorical. Knowing doesn't feel like a surprise. It doesn't even really feel like a betrayal. He's sure she'd had her reasons. They'd probably even sound like good reasons, were she ever to tell him that much, which she never will. He likes Gertrude, he admires her, but he’s never really trusted her. He believes in her, in what she’s doing, but some days he wonders if he’s willing to wait around and see what she intends to feed _him_ to.

(She intends to feed him to something. He thinks she might be a little sad to do it. She likes him too, but he's very, very certain that liking won’t be enough to stop her.)

“What are you on the edge of becoming?” Michael asks him.

When Gerry doesn’t answer, Michael laughs. “It doesn’t really matter. You’re rarely given the chance to become much of anything.” For a moment Gerry almost understands, thinks he can just about glimpse it in the mirror closest to them: a thousand flickering versions of his own face and body, gaunt and waxy-skinned or painted over with Sanskrit, his hands bloody or Mary’s hands around his neck, following Gertrude’s beckoning fingers until she leads him to exactly where she wants him or lying in a hospital bed and hoping without much hope that she’ll wrap her fingers around his, that his mother will, that someone will without him having to ask.

“Never really expected to die of old age,” he says, and lights up a cigarette without bothering to ask. The smoke curls away from his lips in ways that it shouldn’t, but it tastes the way it always does when it settles on his tongue.

Michael reaches out to him. The hand looks human. It’s not. Gerry doesn’t flinch this time. He’s too tired, past the point of his eyelids feeling heavy and on to the point where his _bones_ feel like they’re weighing him down. Michael’s bones are heavy too, heavier than they should be. The hand that rests on Gerry’s head just above his left temple feels like a sack of wet cement, the weight just to one side of painful. “Are you ever right about anything that gives you satisfaction?”

“No,” Gerry says. “Not really.”

Michael studies him intently. It’s uncomfortable, as heavy as the hand on his head. Something in Gerry's chest and his belly twists, and he thinks nonsensically that maybe if Michael watches him for long enough he'll start to twist too, until he turns into something unrecognizable even to himself. “I could take care of the most obvious ticking time bomb,” Michael says, “if you wanted.”

It’s a trick, or a trap, almost certainly. “Who doesn’t want to live a little longer?” he asks, and doesn't stop to think that perhaps the words sound enough like a _yes_ to something accustomed to speaking only in riddles until the hand on his head goes from heavy to hurting.

The pain is so sudden and so sharp that he can't see past it. The only reason he knows he doesn't cry out is because the breath he drags into his lungs stays there, like he's forgotten the finer points of breathing, even though his mouth is open panting-wide. Thought is nearly impossible and the only thing he manages to piece together is the grim certainty that, were he to look in the mirror now, Michael’s fingers would no longer look human, and they would be buried in his skull. He closes his eyes.

(Were he to look in the mirror now, he would see himself with Michael’s fingers buried in his skull. He would see the smile on Michael's face as he pushes them deeper, a trick and a trap after all: the Distortion has always loved it best when someone consents to their own destruction. He _does_ see it, even with his eyes shut. He doesn't know if what he's seeing is real or another lie reflected in the mirrors, another version of him teetering on the edge of _becoming_ , whatever that means. _Becoming dead_ , most likely.)

He doesn't die. The pain stops as abruptly as it started. His ears are ringing in the aftermath, and it takes him a moment to realize that Michael is talking to him.

“That should not have worked." Michael flicks human fingers to one side, and something splatters dark and gruesome against the green wallpaper. He makes a faint, humming noise. “I guess I have always been good at getting into people’s heads.”

“You’re not funny,” Gerry manages to gasp out.

“Am I not?”

He sounds genuinely curious, but he doesn’t look it by the time Gerry finally convinces his lungs to expel air and his knees to stay under him. Michael’s hand is outstretched again, fingers stained with gore, a familiar map resting on his upturned palm. The folds match Gerry's memory, but the paper is crisper, cleaner. The life line and the head line on Michael's palm keep trying to get tangled around each other, but by now Gerry is so well acclimated to this unreasonable world of corridors and mirrors and shifting color that he barely notices.

“You gave me that already.”

“I gave you one of them,” Michael says. “This one is different. This one never had the chance to become.” He smiles. It looks like a trick, a trap, a lure. “Don’t you want to see where it leads?”

“You won’t tell me?”

“Maybe I don’t know.” He leans in. Gerry doesn’t step back. He tells himself that it’s because he’s not sure his legs will support a retreat. "Maybe I just don't want _you_ to know." When Michael's cheek brushes his own it feels just like skin, warm and yielding with a trace of stubble along the jaw. It's the most impressive lie the Distortion has told him yet. "Does it matter?"

Gerry exhales. He's close enough to feel the way that Michael breathes in. He's close enough to notice that Michael doesn't breathe out, even when he speaks again. Gerry wonders if he even bothers to open his mouth to talk, or if they've reached the limits of how human Michael can pretend to be. 

“Do you understand, yet? I lead to all the places that were never there. Don’t you want to see?”

He’s always been too curious for his own good.

The paper is in his hands. Michael is gone. His legs have mostly stopped shaking. He follows the map, and the map leads him home.

Gerry doesn’t recognize the house he steps out of. For a moment he thinks that the front door looks yellow, but he blinks and sees nothing but flimsy new construction faux mahogany. He doesn’t recognize the house, but when he reaches the corner and sees the name of the street he’s standing on he knows where he is. Mary had never been much of a teacher, but once upon a time Gerry had been a very attentive student. _Hill Top Road_. Even his mum had never been too keen to go poking around on Hill Top Road, and the shiver that goes down his spine feels a lot like another bullet dodged.

The door spitting him out here does create other problems, since the one he’d entered through had been on the exterior wall of a chain Tex Mex restaurant in New Jersey. He’s going to have to do some explaining, albeit less explaining than he would have to do if Gertrude was anyone else. His cell phone doesn’t work and continues not to work even as he lets his legs carry him closer to the center of town. Eventually he acknowledges that prolonged time _inside_ something created by one of the Entities probably isn’t good for electronics and gives up on trying to make it work.

He doesn’t have Gertrude’s number memorized. He doesn’t have anyone’s number memorized, and he also doesn’t really have anyone else he would call. His options are limited, but the money in his wallet hasn’t been improbably changed by his time wandering the corridors and buying a train ticket is easy enough.

He feels—strange, the whole trip to London, disconnected from the world around him. The feeling doesn’t fade once he’s off the train, and he’s almost surprised to find the Institute still standing where he had left it.

Gerry doesn't like repeating himself, but he's too shaky to feel creative: he tells the receptionist that he wants to make a statement. She gives him the same gimlet eye as before but doesn’t seem to recognize him. She directs him downstairs and to the office he knows is Gertrude’s. “The Head Archivist should be free to see you.”

Gertrude being back at the Institute seems like unlikely luck. Maybe the receptionist had misspoken and it's one of the archival assistants she's directed him to, although he's been under the impression that Gertrude is currently between assistants. Maybe more time has passed while he wandered the hallways of the Spiral than he originally thought, and Gertrude has returned to London without him. Either way, he’ll be able to find what he needs here: Gertrude, or someone who can get a message to her. He sits down and settles himself in for a wait, but he doesn’t need to wait for long.

The door opens.

The person who steps through is unmistakably Michael, but it still takes Gerry a moment to recognize him. These days he’s more likely to see Michael in reflection, jacket torn and hair and eyes wild, or bent into a shape barely recognizable as Michael at all. This Michael looks like the one Gerry had first met eons ago, although he’s thrown a blazer over his moth-eaten sweater and twisted his hair up at the back of his head in a mostly futile attempt to look more respectable. Gerry is sympathetic. He's worn a suit a time or two for his work with Gertrude, and even she's been forced to admit that there's not much a change of clothes can do to make him look more reputable. 

“Sorry to keep you waiting,” Michael says, as though Gerry has been left waiting for any length of time, as though this isn’t impossible even by Gerry’s incredibly high standards for calling anything an impossibility. He looks suspiciously at the door. The door stubbornly remains the same boring door that has always led to and from Gertrude's office. His gaze returns to Michael. The feeling of unreality from the train returns, setting heavy over his shoulders and the spot on his head that still feels tender and sore.

He’s been looking too long. Michael is looking back, puzzled, and Gerry can’t exactly enlighten him when he’s still scrambling explain the situation to himself. “I was told I could give my statement to the Head Archivist,” he says, partially to buy time and partially because he would _really_ like to speak to Gertrude now. “Is she in?”

The confusion clears from Michael’s face. It’s replaced by a wince, one which he tries and fails to hide. “You must be thinking of my predecessor,” he says. “Gertrude.” He sounds warm and fond when he says her name, but there’s a strange hesitation before he lets it slip through his lips. “I hadn’t realized you knew her. You—haven’t heard?”

Gerry's mind goes suddenly blank and still as the words settle like lead in the pit of his stomach. For a few seconds he just sits there, his whirring thoughts replaced by a terrible kind of clarity. He doesn’t trust Gertrude. He’s started to think that she’s done some things he can’t condone, that knowing her might end poorly for him—well, he's always known that last bit, if he's being honest. He likes her, though. He thinks that the world would lose something essential without her in it. “She’s dead.”

Michael startles. “No! No, no—no. I didn’t mean to—I wasn’t trying to—.” He pauses, takes a breath. “She’s fine. There—there was an accident.” He rubs at the corner of his eye and doesn’t stop until he sees Gerry watching. “She’s retired now. I have her contact information, if you were trying to reach her.”

“What happened?”

When no immediate answer is given Gerry starts to think that he won't get an answer, but eventually Michael sighs and drops heavily into the room’s other chair. He looks tired. “I’m surprised you didn’t hear. The fire was all over the news. It took months for them to determine that the structural damage wasn’t bad enough for us to need to close the doors permanently. And we lost poor Mr. Bouchard, but—well, less said about that the better. I don't imagine you want all the gory details. Gertrude was here when it happened. She was injured by some of the debris.” He says it all very smoothly, like this isn't the first time he's told this story. He says it like he knows, or at least suspects, that a story is all it is: unconvinced and unconvincing, eyes looking anywhere but at Gerry.

 _Liar_ , Gerry thinks, and almost smiles.

“She’s always been fragile," Michael says. "Smart, of course, and very determined, but she probably wasn’t long from retirement, even if—of course, all of us wish the circumstances had been better.” 

“Of course,” Gerry echoes. He's only half paying attention to the words coming out of his mouth. He's thinking. He's starting to understand. “And you’re the Archivist now?”

_I lead to all the places that were never there_.

Michael smiles at him, and it’s a little wry but it’s also much the same smile that Gerry remembers from their first meeting, sunny and goofy and uncomplicated. “I’m the everything here, right at this moment. It’s all a little bit of a mess, if I’m being honest.” He shakes his head. “Which I suppose I am. Being honest. I’m really not sure why I’m telling you this. You just—you remind me of someone, a little.”

 _Sometimes he thinks you remind him of someone he once knew, a friend he lost_ , the woman in the mirror had said. _He’s right._

“I think my dad used to work here,” Gerry offers, “a long time ago. I don’t know if I have the look of him at all.”

“Ah.” Michael is still staring at him, and the silence has just passed into _too long_ when he seems to realize it and clears his throat awkwardly. “That’s how you know Gertrude, is it? Did you want that contact information?” He's broken the silence, but he hasn't stopped staring.

_Mostly he likes you. Yours—well, he liked the look of you, at least._

Gerry smiles. “No. No, I don’t think so.”

Michael clears his throat again. There’s color on his cheeks. He laughs a little bit, and it’s as familiar and as strange as everything else about him, softer and warmer than Gerry is used to hearing it but with the same little sigh on the end. “Did you—you said you wanted to give a statement?”

_I suppose he never got the chance to like anything else about you._

Gerry leans forward and rests his elbows on the desk. He thinks about lighting a cigarette and wonders if that would draw out the scandalized reaction that he had expected but hadn’t received for tracking muck and damp through the Archives. He wonders if Michael owns a cat, old and ugly and far too generous with her affection. He wonders about a lot, has a lot of questions. He's always been curious. He doesn't ask. He has time now to wait for his answers.

The world still feels off and odd, but maybe that doesn't have to be a bad thing, to step into a place both familiar and strange and find his life made new.

“Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, I’ll give you a statement.”


End file.
